Actually, (from another thread) I think that it is related to how environment variables are accessed.
Consider: $ FOO=benoît ./pharo Pharo.image eval 'OSEnvironment current associations' {'TERM_PROGRAM'->'Apple_Terminal'. 'TERM'->'xterm-256color'. 'SHELL'->'/bin/bash'. 'TMPDIR'->'/var/folders/sy/sndrtj9j1tq06j0lfnshmrl80000gn/T/'. 'FOO'->'benoît'. 'Apple_PubSub_Socket_Render'->'/private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.uWk7pivcLT/Render'. 'TERM_PROGRAM_VERSION'->'404'. 'TERM_SESSION_ID'->'845BECCD-0AB0-4686-B7F9-3A0FF84BDCB7'. 'USER'->'sven'. 'SSH_AUTH_SOCK'->'/private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.y5oCwdUyaG/Listeners'. 'PATH'->'/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/texbin:/opt/X11/bin'. 'PWD'->'/tmp/benoiÌt'. 'XPC_FLAGS'->'0x0'. 'XPC_SERVICE_NAME'->'0'. 'HOME'->'/Users/sven'. 'SHLVL'->'2'. 'LOGNAME'->'sven'. 'LC_CTYPE'->'UTF-8'. 'DISPLAY'->'/private/tmp/com.apple.launchd.lsgASYFiWW/org.macosforge.xquartz:0'. 'SECURITYSESSIONID'->'186a9'. 'OLDPWD'->'/tmp/benoiÌt'. '_'->'/tmp/benoiÌt/pharo-vm/Pharo.app/Contents/MacOS/Pharo'. '__CF_USER_TEXT_ENCODING'->'0x1F5:0x0:0x0'} As you can see, several values are wrongly decoded - and this is on macOS as well. > On 16 Apr 2018, at 15:10, Sven Van Caekenberghe <s...@stfx.eu> wrote: > > > >> On 16 Apr 2018, at 14:51, Alistair Grant <akgrant0...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> Hi Sven, >> >> On 16 April 2018 at 13:57, Sven Van Caekenberghe <s...@stfx.eu> wrote: >>> >>> Technically, at the File (FilePlugin) level we seem to be able to handle >>> paths with strange characters, even on Windows, but somehow, somewhere a >>> bogus call is made during image startup. >> >> I'm not going to have time to look at this in the next few days, sorry. >> >> But I have a vague memory that some of the other primitives outside >> FilePlugin don't add the "\\?\" prefix, so they possibly also don't do >> wide character conversion. > > Then I hope some other Windows user/developer can have a look. > Hell, I believe we got a few French people working on Pharo, n'est pas ? > >> Cheers, >> Alistair